“... its publication out of his own pocket, and who prepared a précis for personal presentation to the King – one of the earliest scientific soundbites. ‘But for him, in all human probability’, wrote Augustus de Morgan in the mid-19th century, the Principia ‘would not have been thought of, nor when thought of written, nor when written printed’. Halley ...”

“... to play fifty years ago) were also billed, alongside veterans from the founding festival: Santana, David Crosby, Country Joe McDonald, the remains of the Grateful Dead, Canned Heat and others. But Lang’s fifty-up began to unravel when his top-dog investor, the Japanese digicoms company Dentsu Aegis, announced from its London HQ that it was pulling ...”

“... small ways, that the trouble with Texas is the trouble with America. Faith, he tells us, is king. ‘No church captured the spirit of Tulia,’ he writes, ‘like the Church of Christ . . . the intolerance of the Church of Christ is legendary.’ Anti-gay, anti-welfare, anti-urban, this Christian sect is setting the agenda for America, as it set the ...”

“... often repeated tic: Yakimov’s wearyingly reiterated obsession with food and drink; the diplomat David Boyd’s snigger-cum-snuffle. The high-budget TV version brought the best out of the books. Alan Plater’s adroit screenplay, though it runs for six hours, removed almost all repetitions and longueurs. More, it gave interpretative shape to what, though not ...”

“... of the Prussian Order of the Black Eagle, which was stamped onto the coins issued by the first king of Prussia; the phrase was also used as the title of a Bach cantata of 1715. As MacGregor points out, the motto with its varying uses raises the central question of modern German history: how could such a noble ideal be perverted? The exhibition doesn’t ...”

“... protests in the streets: the demonstrators condemned the killings and chanted slogans in favour of King Abdullah. Zawahiri drew the obvious conclusion, but other jihadis failed to understand the value of restraint. Every time a jihadi movement has won power it has lost popularity by failing to give the people what they want: peace, security and jobs. In ...”

“... privately printed by a cousin. As Hirshler writes, one of those illustrations – a picture of a king as a small boy – ‘bears an uncanny resemblance to Julia’s own likeness’ in Sargent’s picture. The inanimate objects in that picture also have a history. Hirshler says the room in which the girls pose was the ‘grande antichambre’ – the hall ...”

“... Mosul, Picot was unaware that Kitchener and Sykes were secretly planning to give it to him,’ David Fromkin wrote in A Peace to End All Peace (1989). ‘They wanted the French sphere of influence to be extended from the Mediterranean coast on the west all the way to the east so that it paralleled and adjoined Russian-held zones; the French zone was to ...”

“... of her time at Cambridge that she got her own first ‘dusty answer’. She fell for the dashing David Keswick, who seemed so ‘very, very smitten’ that after one kiss she knew they would be together for ever. She was devastated when he explained he had been engaged to somebody else for years. She renounced love and made a short, disastrous marriage on ...”

“... inhabitants of that same country, and not only in England. Across the Channel they wondered why a king should choose to marry his mistress. (The whole point is, however, that Anne never was Henry’s mistress, whereas her sister Mary was. When Henry was accused of having slept not only with Anne’s sister but with her mother, he disarmingly ...”

“... North are eco-lodge versions of Kafka’s Committee of Affairs, or the banal halls of the IRS in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King – populated by Systems GuysTM and characterised by morbid bureaucracy. One small gripe is that Beauman doesn’t allow us to spend enough time in any of these places to get a proper ...”

“... shtetl Jew endeavouring simply to subsist’.The marriage became even more strained after Meir met David Remez, director of the public works office of the Histadrut, who helped her get a job at the Women Workers’ Council in Tel Aviv. She took the children to live there, leaving Morris in Jerusalem. Meir’s affair with Remez lasted for two decades, until his ...”

“... of Charles II, and though one would be hard put to find much resemblance between the ‘Church and King’ Tories and the rabble who contested the leadership of the Conservative Party last year, it is without question the most successful political party in modern European history.Sometimes it has been a force of reaction, in the spirit of Lord Salisbury, a ...”

“... the ‘Imperator’ and ‘Sâr’ (a title he claimed was bestowed on his family by a Babylonian king) of a Rosicrucian order called the Rose + Croix esthétique, which Satie joined as its in-house composer. For the inauguration of the Salon de la Rose + Croix, the order’s cultural wing, Satie composed three ‘Sonneries’ for trumpets and harps. No ...”

“... I don’t know about the robot duck, yet. But the Giant Beetroot comes straight from something in David Hume.This method, it should be obvious, has nothing to do with the weakly whacky. It caricatures, it counterfactualises and it reductio-ad-absurdums. But it does so in strict relation to real historical sources, in an oddly angled, yet almost geometrically ...”